By Ruth Steinhardt
The George Washington University’s Students for Recovery group hosted its Bash for Recovery Wednesday night, bringing MTV reality star Jason Wahler to the Dorothy Betts Marvin Theatre for an intimate discussion of the challenges and rewards of sobriety.
The presentation was the capstone of Recovery Month and was held in part to promote the Unite to Face Addiction Rally held Sunday on the National Mall.
A decade ago, Mr. Wahler was a featured performer on MTV’s hit reality shows Laguna Beach and The Hills. The exposure from those shows gave him the opportunity to be “paid to party,” he said, spending evenings at bars and clubs that paid him to promote their brands. But as his star rose he developed severe alcohol and substance abuse problems, sending him into a spiral that led eventually to an attempted suicide.
“I had everything society depicted as amazing—money, cars, fame, access, anything I wanted,” he said. “I thought I was living the dream.” And yet, he continued, “I was so miserable, so sick and so uncomfortable in my own skin.”
Now, Mr. Wahler is a passionate advocate for recovery. He has been sober since July 2010, an accomplishment he credits in part to mentors like addiction specialist Drew Pinsky—with whom Mr. Wahler worked on Celebrity Rehab from 2010 to 2011—and in part to the meaning he gets from his own work.
As a teenager, he said, “I had such a false sense of reality. I had no responsibilities at all. I never had to work—all that ‘work’ [on the show] was fake—and money came easy.”
Walking into his first job at Northbound Treatment Services as an adult in his early 20s was terrifying, he said. But the work as a client advocate gave him “responsibility and, more importantly, accountability.”
Now, he prioritizes his recovery above everything else. When he began dating model Ashley Slack, he said, he told her “Sobriety is my number one priority. If I don’t have that, I won’t have anything.” She supported his decision, and they were married in 2013.
Mr. Wahler is working on a new reality show—one he says will realistically depict life in recovery.
“Life in recovery is absolutely worth living,” he said.
Many in the audience were themselves in recovery, either in SFR or as members of the community. Tom Coderre, a senior adviser at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, expressed his support for Mr. Wahler’s new show, comparing its focus on recovery to dramatic portrayals of addiction and suffering like A&E’s “Intervention.”
“We have to show people what life looks like in recovery,” Mr. Coderre said. On television, “you can see addiction 24/7, but you can’t always see recovery.”
Students for Recovery, the first university recovery group to be created in Washington, D.C., supports and advocates for students recovering from mental illness, addiction or substance abuse. It holds meetings Tuesdays and Wednesdays at the Serenity Shack, located in the basement of a townhouse on 22nd & F Street. The meetings are open to the entire student body, and organizers plan to start a new meeting Thursdays.
Event organizer Timothy Rabolt, a founder of SFR and graduate fellow in the Collegiate Recovery Program, said the event was a success by SFR’s most important metric: outreach. “We had a new student come forward about joining our group, and that alone proves it was a success,” he said. “It’s important to raise awareness about mental illness and addiction because [these are] issues that affect the entire community.”
“For me it would have been an amazing thing to have had [SFR] on campus,” Mr. Wahler said.
He encouraged members of the group to build SFR’s profile and to celebrate their own individual recovery narratives.
“You don’t have to be ashamed,” Mr. Wahler said. “So many people out there struggle with these same things. There’s no shame in reaching out and asking for help. It’s one of the most courageous things you can do.”